Don Byron via Matrix

Don Byron

VIA THE INTEGRATED GLOBAL
CREATIVE ECONOMY

inspired by
THE GRAPEVINE TELEGRAPH
of Pre-Civil War African-Americans

promulgated by
The Brazilian Ministry of Culture

fomented by
The Bahian Secretary of Culture

fomented by
The Palmares Foundation
for the promotion of Afro-Brazilian Culture

fomented by
The National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples

I CURATE

Network Node

Name: Don Byron
City/Place: New York City
Country: United States

CURATION

from this node by: Matrix+

Life & Work

Bio: Don Byron has been a singular voice in an astounding range of musical contexts, exploring widely divergent traditions while continually striving for what he calls “a sound above genre.” As clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, arranger, and social critic, he redefines every genre of music he plays, be it classical, salsa, hip-hop, funk, rhythm & blues, klezmer, or any jazz style from swing and bop to cutting-edge downtown improvisation. He has been consistently voted best clarinetist by critics and readers alike in leading international music journals since being named “Jazz Artist of the Year” by Down Beat in 1992. Acclaimed as much for his restless creativity as for his unsurpassed virtuosity as a player, Byron has presented a multitude of projects at major music festivals around the world, including recent performances in Vienna, San Francisco, Hong Kong, London, Monterey, New Zealand, and on New York’s Broadway.

BEGINNINGS: Born and raised in the Bronx, Byron was exposed to a wide variety of music by his father, who played bass in calypso bands, and his mother, a pianist. His taste was further refined by trips to the symphony and ballet and by many hours spent listening to Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Machito recordings. He formalized his music education by studying classical clarinet with Joe Allard while playing and arranging salsa numbers for high school bands on the side. He later studied with George Russell in the Third Stream Department of the New England Conservatory of Music and, while in Boston, also performed with Latin and jazz ensembles.

COLLABORATIONS: His artistic collaborations include performances and recordings with Mario Bauza, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, John Hicks, Tom Cora, Bill Frisell, Vernon Reid, Marc Ribot, Cassandra Wilson, Hamiet Bluiett, Anthony Braxton, Geri Allen, Hal Willner, Marilyn Crispell, Reggie Workman, Craig Harris, David Murray, Leroy Jenkins, Bobby Previte, Gerry Hemingway, DD Jackson, Douglas Ewart, Brandon Ross, Ed Neumeister, Tom Pierson, Steve Coleman, Living Colour, Ralph Peterson, Uri Caine, Mandy Patinkin, Steve Lacy, the Kansas City All-Stars, the Bang On A Can All-Stars, Medeski Martin & Wood, Angelique Kidjo, Carole King, Daniel Barenboim, Salif Keita, the Atlanta Symphony, Klangforum Wien, Joe Henry, Paul Auster, Meshell Ndegeocello, and many others.

PROJECTS: An integral member of New York’s cultural community for almost two decades, Byron has taken part in an extraordinarily wide range of projects. From 1996-99, he served as Artistic Director of Jazz at the Brooklyn Academy of Music where he curated a concert series for the Next Wave Festival and premiered his children’s show, Bug Music for Juniors (formerly Tunes and ‘Toons). From 2000-05, he was Artist-in-Residence at New York’s Symphony Space, where he established is Adventurers Orchestra through another concert series titled Contrasting Brilliance, featuring his takes on music as diverse as Henry Mancini, Sly Stone, the pioneering hip-hop label Sugar Hill Records, Igor Stravinsky, Raymond Scott, Herb Alpert and Earth, Wind and Fire.

Other projects include arrangements of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musicals; There Goes the Neighborhood, a piece commissioned and performed by the Kronos Quartet; and original scores for the silent film Scar of Shame and a 1961 television episode by comedy pioneer Ernie Kovacs. He wrote and performed music for the dance companies of Donald Byrd, Bebe Miller, Mark Dendy, and Ellen Sinopoli, and was featured in Robert Altman’s movie Kansas City and the Paul Auster film Lulu on the Bridge. He also composed and recorded the score for Joel Katz’s film Strange Fruit, a documentary about the 1930s protest song made famous by Billie Holiday. Composing commissions include “Spin”, a duet for violin and piano premiered at the Library of Congress; “Red”, a big band suite premiered at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2002, and a new string quartet piece for Ethel.

RECORDINGS: Don Byron has released a diverse array of recordings. Since his ground-breaking debut album, Tuskegee Experiments (Nonesuch, 1992), he has recorded prolifically: Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz (Nonesuch, 1993), a tribute to the sly and bitingly humorous works of the neglected 1950’s klezmer band leader; Music for Six Musicians (Nonesuch, 1995) which explores a significant side of his musical identity, the Afro-Caribbean heritage of his family and the neighborhood where he grew up; No-Vibe Zone (Knitting Factory Works, 1996), a vibrant live recording featuring his quintet; and Bug Music (Nonesuch,1996), his spirited showcase of the nascent Swing Era music of Raymond Scott, John Kirby and the young Duke Ellington.

His 1998 Blue Note debut, Nu Blaxploitation, is a funk and hip-hop inspired and “genre-bending” musical meditation with his band Existential Dred, with poet Sadiq and rap icon Biz Markie in performances reminiscent of the spoken-word pieces of Gil Scott-Heron, Amiri Baraka and Henry Rollins; Romance With The Unseen (1999), features a quartet consisting of guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Drew Gress and drummer Jack DeJohnette playing a wide-ranging repertory, from obscure Ellington (”A Mural from Two Perspectives”) to popular Beatles (”I’ll Follow the Sun”) to Byron originals loaded with socio-political commentary (”Bernhard Goetz, James Ramseur and Me”, a reference to the notorious 1984 New York City subway shooting).

With 2000’s A Fine Line: Arias & Lieder, Byron continued to blur stylistic borders by exploring and expanding the definition of the modern art song from Robert Schumann and Giacomo Puccini to Roy Orbison and Stevie Wonder. His 2001 release, You Are #6, once again finds him in the company of his longest-standing group, Music for Six Musicians, paying tribute to the Latin and Afro-Caribbean rhythms at his musical roots. His latest Blue Note release, Ivey-Divey, inspired by Lester Young’s classic trio recording with Nat King Cole and Buddy Rich, features pianist Jason Moran and Jack DeJohnette and is also his recording debut on tenor saxophone. Ivey-Divey received a Grammy nomination for best instrumental solo and was voted Album of the Year 2004 by Jazz Times Magazine.

Additional CD releases are A Ballad for Many, an album of his compositions performed by the Bang On A Can All-Stars (Cantaloupe Music) and Do the Boomerang, his interpretations of the music of saxophonist, singer, and soul/R&B legend Junior Walker (Blue Note, October 2006).

Don Byron is also an experienced and gifted teacher, who has led residencies at the University of California San Diego, the University of Nevada Reno, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Columbia University. He was an Associate Professor at The State University of New York (Albany), and an Associate Professor of Jazz Studies at Metropolitan University, Denver, CO.

from https://lvanhart.com/artists/don-byron/

Contact Information

Management/Booking: LVanHart Artist Productions
Laura Hartmann, President
45 Birch St, Suite 12H
Kingston. NY 12401
Tel: (845) 514-2079
E-Mail: [email protected]
Skype: laura.hartmann63

Media | Markets

▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCOBRhY4QRqNe-w2A0l3ZqHQ
▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/1Vl4UW6vmgoPhDZRyIPLf1
▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/03ws2WPrbwqxWPcHrR0Q2q
▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/61bADqhC33vLs7KGpbyqar
▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/3v6dasC9ywop1Kc9oPajzW
▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/6wXtsn2h8lfvfbH2EXSNCI
▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/1r1j0TuFTjmcB6TurJ5EDa

Clips (more may be added)

1:24:50
Jazz Greats – Don Byron and Aruan Ortiz
By Don Byron

235 views

Don Byron Curated

What's Been Happening?

A category was added to Don Byron:

Dance Performance Scores
- July 2, 2020
A category was added to Don Byron:

Blue Note Records
- July 2, 2020
A category was added to Don Byron:

Film Scores
- July 2, 2020
Angelique Kidjo → Singer-Songwriter has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020
Angelique Kidjo → New York City has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020
Angelique Kidjo → Multi-Cultural has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020
Angelique Kidjo → Benin has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020
Angelique Kidjo → Africa has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020
Steve Coleman → Saxophone has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020
Steve Coleman → Multi-Cultural has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020
Steve Coleman → Jazz has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020
Steve Coleman → Composer has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020
A category was added to Don Byron:

New York City
- July 2, 2020
A category was added to Don Byron:

Avant-Garde Jazz
- July 2, 2020
A category was added to Don Byron:

Klezmer
- July 2, 2020
A category was added to Don Byron:

Jazz
- July 2, 2020
A category was added to Don Byron:

Clarinet
- July 2, 2020
Aruán Ortiz → Piano has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020
Aruán Ortiz → New York City has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020
Aruán Ortiz → Jazz has been recommended via Don Byron.
- July 2, 2020

English (Portuguese →)

Pathways from Brazil

THROUGH THE INTEGRATED GLOBAL CREATIVE ECONOMY

(all is closer than we imagine)

"I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
✅—Susan Rogers
Personal recording engineer: Prince, Paisley Park
Director: Music Perception & Cognition Laboratory, Berklee College of Music
Author: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You

The matrix was created in Salvador's Centro Histórico, where Bule Bule below, among magisterial colleagues for whom this matrix was originally built, sings "Chegou a hora dessa gente bronzeada mostrar seu valor... The time has come for these bronzed people to show their worth..."

Created because in common with most cultures around our planet, the preponderance of Brazil's vast cultural treasure has been impossible to find from outside of circumscribed regions, including Brazil itself...

Music & lyrics (Brasil Pandeiro) by Assis Valente of Santo Amaro, Bahia, Brazil. Video by Betão Aguiar of Salvador.

Thus something new under the tropical sun: A means by which those above, those below, and EVERYBODY ELSE in the creative economy can be divulged EVERYWHERE.

Quincy Jones can curate Gilberto Gil, for example. And Gil can curate, writers, dancers, filmmakers, painters, record producers, set designers...Luê Soares of Belém do Pará behind the mic above. You get to Quincy, you can get to Luê. Direct line.

And by the mathematics of the small world phenomenon, everybody in the matrix will tend to proximity to everybody else, in the same way that most human beings are within some six or so steps of most others.

The difference being that in the matrix, these steps are along pathways that can be travelled. The creative world becomes a neighborhood. Quincy Jones is right up the street and Branford Marsalis around the corner. And the most far-flung genius you've never heard of is just a few doors down. Maybe even in Brazil. Laroyê!

"Matrixado!"

✅—Founding Member Darius Mans
Economist, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
✅—Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
President of Brazil

The matrix is the ultimate evolution of a pathway which began in New York City decades ago per the "rescue" of unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Led Zeppelin, Philip Glass, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd of Kingston's Studio One (Bob Marley's producer), and others. A long and winding road that led inexorably to the necessity of a truly open arts universe, for there is more in Heaven and Earth...

"Many thanks for this - I am touched!"
✅—Julian Lloyd Webber
That most fabled cellist in the United Kingdom (and Brazilian music fan)

"I'm truly thankful... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
✅—Nduduzo Makhathini
Blue Note recording artist)

"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
✅—Alicia Svigals
Founder of The Klezmatics

"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
✅—Clarice Assad
Compositions recorded by Yo Yo Ma and played by orchestras around the world

"Thank you"
(Banch Abegaze, manager)
✅—Kamasi Washington

Tap people, tap categories, tap curations... The matrix is a maze of tunnels within King Solomon's creative mines.

(← Inglês) Português

Caminhos do Brasil

ATRAVÉS DA ECONOMIA CRIATIVA GLOBAL INTEGRADA

(tudo está mais perto do que imaginamos)

"Fico muitíssimo feliz em receber seu e-mail! Obrigada por me incluir neste matrix maravilhoso."
✅—Susan Rogers
Engenheiro de gravação pessoal para Prince: Paisley Park
Diretora: Laboratório de Percepção e Cognição Musical, Berklee College of Music
Autora: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You

O matrix foi criado no Centro Histórico de Salvador, onde Bule Bule abaixo, entre colegas magisteriais para quem este matrix foi originalmente construído, canta "Chegou a hora dessa gente bronzeada mostrar seu valor..."

Criado porque em comum com a maioria das culturas ao redor do nosso planeta, a preponderância do vasto tesouro cultural do Brasil tem sido impossível de encontrar de fora de regiões circunscritas, incluido o próprio Brasil...

Música & letras (Brasil Pandeiro) por Assis Valente de Santo Amaro, Bahia. Vídeo por Betão Aguiar de Salvador.

Assim algo novo sob o sol tropical: Um meio pelo qual os acima, os abaixo e TODOS OS OUTROS na economia criativa podem ser divulgados em TODOS OS LUGARES.

Quincy Jones pode indicar Gilberto Gil, por exemplo. Gil pode indicar escritores, dançarinos, cineastas, pintores, produtores de discos...Luê Soares de Belém do Pará atrás do microfone acima. Você chega em Quincy, pode chegar em Luê. Linha direta.

E pela matemática do fenômeno de mundo pequeno, todos no matrix tenderão a se aproximar de todos, da mesma forma que a maioria dos seres humanos estão dentro de cerca de seis passos da maioria dos outros.

Com a diferença que no matrix, estes passos estão ao longo de caminhos que podem ser percorridos. O mundo criativo se torna uma vizinhança. Quincy Jones está lá em cima e Branford Marsalis está ao virar da esquina. E o gênio distante que você nunca ouviu falar tá lá embaixo. Talvez até no Brasil. Laroyê!

"Matrixado!"

✅—Membro Fundador Darius Mans
Economista, doutorado, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
✅—Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Presidente do Brasil

O matrix é a evolução definitiva de um caminho que começou em Nova York há décadas atrás pelo "resgate" dos direitos autorais não pagos para Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Led Zeppelin, Philip Glass, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd do Studio One de Kingston (o produtor de Bob Marley), e outros. Um longo e sinuoso caminho que levou inexoravelmente à necessidade de um universo de artes verdadeiramente abertom pois há mais no Céu e na Terra...

"Muito obrigado por isso - estou tocado!"
✅—Julian Lloyd Webber
Estamos tocados também Sr. Webber!
Merecidamente o violoncelista mais lendário do Reino Unido (e fã da música brasileira)

"Estou realmente agradecido... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
✅—Nduduzo Makhathini
Artista da Blue Note)

"Obrigada, esta é uma ideia brilhante!!"
✅—Alicia Svigals
Fundadora do The Klezmatics

"Este é um trabalho super impressionante! Parabéns! Obrigada por me incluir :)))"
✅—Clarice Assad
Composições gravadas por Yo Yo Ma e tocadas por orquestras ao redor do mundo

"Thank you"
(Banch Abegaze, empresário)
✅—Kamasi Washington

Toque em pessoas, toque em categorias, toque em curadoria... O matrix é um labirinto de túneis dentro das minas criativas do Rei Salomão.